Nothing But Words

When Typing Was Noisy, Computers Were People, and Digits Were Fingers

Topic: Technobabble
Tags: Musings

Now that I’m working at home, and at my computer all day, I’m trying to create a good ergonomic desk setup for myself (especially with my ongoing back problems). If you spend your time day in and day out working with the same set of tools, you need them to be quality tools. So I started today by shopping online for a good keyboard, and ended up taking a journey through history and language. But first, the keyboard…

An old Royal portable typewriter

A keyboard with fancy lights or extra multimedia keys holds no attraction for me. The currently popular flat, laptop style keyboards drive me crazy, as there’s hardly any tactile feedback. By learning to type as a child on my mother’s 1960s Royal portable typewriter, it’s been imprinted in some primal corner of my brain that the sensation of a nice mechanical whack when hitting (not tapping) the keys is really satisfying. Before the mouse became a common computer input device, computers were expensive, and people were used to the feel of typewriters. A keyboard that was popular then, and apparently still has a small but devoted following today, was the IBM Model M:

[Back then] the keyboard was the only day-to-day input device for almost all computers, and most users were tapping away at the things a great deal. Keyboards mattered. People cared. There were actually advertisements in computer magazines in which manufacturers bragged about how kick-ass their keyboards were.

The boasts were justified. There have been various technologies dreamt up over the years for keyboards, all trying to make the ‘board feel nice to use, last well, and not cost a million dollars. The “buckling spring” keyswitches in this IBM ‘board and some other old-style units are widely acknowledged to be the best ever developed in every regard, except cost.

They’ve got not-too-light but not-too-heavy key weighting, they’ve got the kind of positive click that I imagine you’d feel on the firing button for the Death Star’s primary armament, and their demonstrated service life, despite extraordinary abuse, is preposterously long. Essentially, if you don’t take to one of these things with a hammer, it’ll probably outlast you, even if you spend all day, every day, typing.

…The attractiveness of Real Keyboards faded with the arrival of mouse-based user interfaces. Suddenly all of that basic housekeeping typing became unnecessary. Programmers and data enterers and writers still typed like crazy, but everyone else could point and click their way through many tasks.

And when you don’t need to use the keyboard all day, you don’t really care how good the ‘board is, as long as it doesn’t stop working. Big heavy indestructible keyboards like the [Model M] became an unsupportable expense for the average personal computer, and they died out…

In addition to all that, apparently the Model M also makes you a better typist:

With the Model M, I type faster than on other keyboards - much faster. My personal best on a laptop was 50 words per minute on my old 12″ PowerBook. I’ve hit about the same speed on my various ThinkPads, MacBooks, and Toshibas, but the 12″ PowerBook was, in my opinion, the fastest laptop keyboard.

I just took a typing test using my old Model M and hit 64 words per minute - and I had fewer typos in the process. There’s just something right about the design; I really can’t describe it other than saying that my finger always presses hard enough and never too hard on a Model M - are two of the many reasons for typos on lesser keyboards.

Of course you still have to hit the right key, but even that seems easier on this most magical of keyboards. The new one I just bought cost almost $70 for something made well over a decade ago, and I consider it a bargain.

…while noisy and intrusive to your neighbors, there’s one very good reason why the buckling spring keyboard remained in production for so many years and why it’s something of a specialty item today. Those switches are very expensive compared to the cheap rubber domes in use today, and it’s those switches that give this keyboard its legendary feel (and make it too expensive for this age of made-in-China mass-production).

After reading all that I was hooked, and I ordered one. Unicomp now has the rights to the Model M and they still make them (but they’ve renamed it the “Customizer”).

A World War II recruiting poster for women stenographers

My keyboard quest got me thinking about that old Royal typewriter, so I did a quick Google image search and found a picture that looks just like it. I also came across a World War II poster for recruiting women to be stenographers. But that’s not all they did - many women worked as “computers” and after the war some went on to become the world’s first programmers:

Before the invention of electronic computers, “computer” was a job description, not a machine. Both men and women were employed as computers, but women were more prominent in the field. This was a matter of practicality more than equality. Women were hired because there was a large pool of women with training in mathematics, but they could be hired for much less money than men with comparable training. Despite this bias, some women overcame their inferior status and contributed to the invention of the first electronic computers.

In 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, hundreds of women were employed around the country as computers. Their job consisted of using mechanical desk calculators to solve long lists of equations. The results of these calculations were compiled into tables and published for use on the battlefields by gunnery officers. The tables allowed soldiers in the field to aim artillery or other weapons, taking into account variable conditions such as temperature and air density. Today, such calculations are done instantly in the battlefield with microcomputers.

…When the ENIAC was nearing completion, six women were chosen from among the human computers to be trained as programmers. …[They] devised the very first computer program, which was demonstrated when the ENIAC was unveiled in early 1946.

Before World War II, the term “computer” also referred to mechanical calculating devices (the Greek Antikythera mechanism, from about 150BC, being the earliest known example). ENIAC, unveiled soon after the end of World War II, was one of the first electronic, digital computers. As such computers came to replace all their human and mechanical counterparts, the descriptor “digital” was eventually dropped.

“Digital” is a word that has evolved into something almost antithetical to its origin. Digits originally referred only to fingers and toes. People use their hands to create and manipulate physical objects - to do things manually. Digits came to be synonymous with numbers, since you can count them with your digits. And computers are digital because they are essentially glorified calculators, and we rely on computers to do things for us automatically.

Sitting between the manual world and automated world, between the analog and the digital, is the keyboard. I’m looking forward to the arrival of my Model M, and feeling something akin to the satisfying whack of an old Royal typewriter as I type my programs - putting in the manual labor that ultimately lies behind all automation.

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English Windows XP with a Japanese Keyboard

Topic: Technobabble
Tags: Japanese Language, Windows

It would have been much more difficult for me to figure out how to setup my Japanese keyboard without the help of the articles, blog posts, and forum posts that others wrote describing their experiences. I figured out a few things that no one else has written about, so the purpose of this post is to give something back to the community of folks who have also struggled with using Japanese in Windows.

I decided to try my luck using a 109 key Japanese keyboard with my English Windows laptop. I thought it might help my Japanese writing if I learned to use the direct Hiragana and Katakana input, instead of typing in Romaji and relying on MS Word to do the conversions for me. I succeeded in getting everything working, but it took some doing.

The place to start is the excellent article Windows XP Japanese Input. As thorough as that article is, it wasn’t quite enough to get my keyboard working correctly. So the next step is Cameron Beccario’s instructions for installing a Japanese keyboard. My keyboard is USB, but the only driver option available for a Japanese keyboard is PS/2. I picked that anyway and it’s working fine. But that only gets the driver in place - you still need to do some configuration work:

• Under Control Panel / Regional and Language Settings / Language Settings / Details, I added “English (United States) - Japanese” as the default input language. You do this by going into the “Installed Services” box, and in the “English” section under “Keyboards” click “Add.” Then in the next window, select English as the input language and Japanese as the keyboard layout. After you click “OK”, this should make “Japanese” appear in bold under “Keyboards” in the “Installed Services” box, meaning it’s the default keyboard layout. You need this setting in order for the keys on the Japanese keyboard to map correctly. If you don’t do this, the Japanese keyboard will still work, but the keys will be mapped to a US keyboard layout (which means, for example, you’ll get an @ symbol when you try to enter a ").
  

  Windows XP language settings for a Japanese keyboard
• With the foregoing setup, if you use the language bar to - for example, switch Microsoft Word to Japanese - you can make the appropriate selections in the Language Bar, type Romaji, and Word will convert it to Hiragana just as it would with a US keyboard. If you want to set it up so that you can simply type the Hiragana as it appears on the Japanese keyboard, then in the Language Bar, select Input Style / Properties, and in the General tab change the input method to Kana.

Some other things worth noting:

• Under Control Panel / Regional and Language Settings / Advanced, I left English as the language for non-Unicode programs. As explained in the article, setting it to Japanese will cause the \ character to appear as ¥ (the yen symbol) and this setting can cause some programs to automatically install themselves in Japanese. And personally, even though there’s no harm in it, seeing yen symbols where backslashes should be in file paths would drive me crazy.
• At least with my keyboard and MS Word, the ¥ will give you a ¥ only if you’re in Romaji input mode (and if you hit it twice, it’ll give you a double backslash). If you switch to Kana input mode, then you can’t get a ¥ from it all - it instead gives you the Katakana vowel extender character (which looks like a stylized em dash).
• In the Kana input mode, you can make use of the 4 special Japanese language keys on the keyboard. A found a nice description of them on this Keyboard scancodes page:
  

  To the left of the spacebar, (Shift-JIS) 無変換 (muhenkan) means no conversion from kana to kanji. To the right of the spacebar, 変換 (henkan) means conversion from kana to kanji. In Microsoft systems it converts the most recently input sequence of kana to the system’s first guess at a string of kanji/kana/etc. with the correct pronunciation and a guess at the meaning. Repeated keypresses change it to other possible guesses which are either less common or less recently used, depending on the situation. The shifted version of this key is 前侯補 (zenkouho) which means “previous candidate” — “zen” means “previous”, while “kouho” means “candidate” (explanation courtesy of NIIBE Yutaka) — it rotates back to earlier guesses for kanji conversion. The alt version of this key is 全侯補 also pronounced (zenkouho), which means “all candidates” — here, “zen” means “all” — it displays a menu of all known guesses. I never use the latter two functions of the key, because after pushing the henkan key about three times and not getting the desired guess, it displays a menu of all known guesses anyway.

  Next on the right, ひらがな (hiragana) means that phonetic input uses one conventional Japanese phonetic alphabet, which of course can be converted to kanji by pressing the henkan key later. The shifted version is カタカナ (katakana) which means the other Japanese phonetic alphabet, and the alt version is ローマ字 (ro-maji) which means the Roman alphabet.

  Near the upper left, 半/全 (han/zen) means switch between hankaku (half-size, the same size as an ASCII character) and zenkaku (full-size, since the amount of space occupied by a kanji is approximately a square, twice as fat as an ASCII character). It only affects katakana and a few other characters (for example there’s a full-width copy of each ASCII character in addition to the single-byte half-width encodings). The alt version of this is 漢字 (kanji) which actually causes typed Roman phonetic keys to be displayed as Japanese phonetic kana (either hiragana or katakana depending on one of the other keys described above) and doesn’t cause conversion to kanji.

• It took me a while to figure out the diacritical marks when in Kana input mode, but I finally got it. For example, to make a た (ta) into a だ (da), you hit the た key, and then the ゛ key (the @ key when in English mode), and then Word will merge them into a single character.
• I have the keyboard hooked up to a laptop which has its own regular US keyboard. There is no way that I know of to have dual keyboard configurations. So this means the laptop keyboard defaults to behaving like a Japanese keyboard, resulting in a a number of keys not mapping correctly. I found this isn’t so bad, as you can toggle between the keyboard layouts in the Language Bar (but you just need to remember the Language Bar settings are per program, so you need to toggle each program; and, of course, you can always change the default keyboard layout back to US English).
• I also discovered that all the Regional and Language Bar settings are per user. So you need to go through all of these steps (except for the driver installation) for each account used on your PC (I imagine this can be dealt with at the Administrator level, but I haven’t checked).

I’m a fairly fast typist, and it’s taken about a week to retrain my fingers for some of the different key positions. The hardest thing to get used to is the teeny tiny space bar (it’s only about twice the width of a regular key). Some of the layout reminds me of my old Commodore 64 - double quote is Shift-2, @ has its own key, etc.

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ENIAC’s 60th Anniversary

Topic: Technobabble

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the creation of ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic computer, here at U Penn. An interview with Presper Eckert, one of its co-inventor’s, was recently published on the ComputerWorld site. I was fascinated by his description of the Harvard Mark 1, ENIAC’s mechanical predecessor:

It could solve linear differential equations, but only linear equations. It had a long framework divided into sections with a couple dozen shafts buried through it. You could put different gears on the shafts using screwdrivers and hammers and it had “integrators,” that gave [the] product of two shafts coming in on a third shaft coming out. By picking the right gear ratio you should get the right constants in the equation. We used published tables to pick the gear ratios to get whatever number you wanted. The limit on accuracy of this machine was the slippage of the mechanical wheels on the integrator.

And about ENIAC itself:

The ENIAC was the first electronic digital computer and could add those two 10-digit numbers in .00002 seconds — that’s 50,000 times faster than a human, 20,000 times faster than a calculator and 1,500 times faster than the Mark 1. For specialized scientific calculations it was even faster… ENIAC could do three-dimensional, second-order differential equations. We were calculating trajectory tables for the war effort. In those days the trajectory tables were calculated by hundreds of people operating desk calculators — people who were called computers. So the machine that does that work was called a computer… ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes… The radio has only five or six tubes, and television sets have up to 30.

He also mentioned that back then Philadelphia was “Vacuum Tube Valley.” My neighbor, a man in his 70s, told me he use to work on re-entry systems in an office on Walnut St. I asked if he meant programs for people re-entering the work force. “No,” he said “I worked for GE, designing re-entry systems for astronauts in spaceships.” It seems that little of this technological legacy remains here. Penn’s school of engineering isn’t what it used to be (Penn’s schools of business, architecture, communications, medicine, nursing and veterinary medicine are all top 5 schools, but engineering ranks 27th). And while there are Lockheed-Martin offices and pharmeceutical companies scattered around the tri-state area, and Drexel is a good engineering school, I don’t get any sense that the city of Philadelphia does anything to capitalize on its remaining engineering and technology assets.

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Microsoft’s Strange Relationship with the English Language

Topic: Technobabble

Fortunately we don’t use much Microsoft software at my job. But we do have one vendor-dependent application that requires us to use SQL Server. I needed to add a column to a table indicating when a record was modified. So I dutifully went to Microsoft’s MSDN site to learn how this is done in SQL Server. I came across the “timestamp” data type. “Hmmm,” I foolishly thought, “maybe this will help me with creating a time stamp.” But no, the documentation says: “The SQL Server timestamp data type has nothing to do with times or dates.” It’s actually a sequential record modification marker that’s useful in data recovery, but it has “…no relationship to time.”

I guess this is the kind of stuff people have to spend their time learning when they go for Microsoft Certification.

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Robots at the NEDO Expo

Topic: Technobabble

In a recent post I talked about Saya the receptionist robot and the implications for human employment in the service sector. She’s being featured at the current NEDO Expo in Aichi, Japan. Check out their Next-generation Robot Development page for pictures and descriptions of her, the childcare robot, the street-cleaning robot, the security guard robot, and more. In June they’ll have demonstrations of 65 different robots, which are organized into the following task areas (I’m not quite sure what these all mean - the accompanying PDF is in Japanese and I can’t read it - but this list should give you the basic idea).

• Network Robotics, RT Middleware (8)
• Robot for Interaction between Humans and Robots (7)
• Outdoor Robot for Skilled Work (8)
• Outdoor Robot for Special Environment Work (10)
• Medical Welfare Robot (10)
• Partner Robot (8)
• Performance Robot (5)
• Humanoid Robot (9)

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The Robots Are Coming

Topic: Politics, Technobabble

I knew the Japanese had been making a lot of progress with industrial robots and toy/pet robots, but I didn’t realize just how far they had come with humanoid robots until I saw the Humanoids with Attitude article in the Washington Post (registration required). The article describes the receptionist robot Saya (that’s her picture on your right) dealing with someone insulting her:

“You’re so stupid!” said the professor, Hiroshi Kobayashi, towering over her desk. “Eh?” she responded, her face wrinkling into a scowl. “I tell you, I am not stupid!” Truth is, Saya isn’t even human. But in a country where robots are changing the way people live, work, play and even love, that doesn’t stop Saya the cyber-receptionist from defending herself from men who are out of line. With voice recognition technology allowing 700 verbal responses and an almost infinite number of facial expressions from joy to despair, surprise to rage, Saya may not be biological — but she is nobody’s fool.

The article also points out the differences between the US and Japanese approaches to R&D in robotics and AI:

In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the “age of the robot.”

I’m fascinated by the cultural factors that influence where different countries choose to focus their technological research efforts. For example, in the US, we’ve taken a no-holds-barred approach to the genetic manipulation of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, even though we don’t yet know what the long-term repercussions might be. In contrast, the Europeans have been very cautious in this area. And while the US has put a straitjacket on research involving human fetal stem cells, the Europeans haven’t. While there are plenty of Americans who would prefer a more European approach to these issues, I think these differences are indicative of some real cultural distinctions, mainly derived from differing perspectives on Christianity and man’s place in the world.

Getting back to robotics, the Washington Post article explains: “Rather than the monstrous Terminators of American movies, robots here [in Japan] are instead seen as gentle, even idealistic creatures.” While many Americans would have a hard time accepting a robot like Saya, the Japanese don’t have a problem with it. The article also points out the economic motivation behind Japan’s focus on robotics: “Confronting a major depopulation problem due to a record low birthrate and its status as the nation with the longest lifespan on Earth, Japanese are fretting about who will staff the factory floors of the world’s second-largest economy in the years ahead.” What the article fails to mention is that the US and much of Europe don’t have to worry too much about declining birthrates because they allow immigration. But allowing mass immigration is not a politically viable option in Japan: the Japanese would prefer to see their future workforce dominated by robots than by non-Japanese.

Setting aside the thorny issue of immigration for a moment, the Japanese predicament arguably would be an ideal situation if the rest of the world were in the same boat. If the global human population were declining, and robots could replace people in the workforce at roughly the same rate, prosperity would be maintained and the negative environmental effects of human population pressures on the globe would be reduced (so long as the human population stabilized at some point - we wouldn’t want to disappear altogether!).

But the Japanese situation is the exception, not the rule. In most of the rest of the world - including the US - the human population is growing due to either high birthrates or immigration, and all those folks need jobs. What will be interesting to see, 10 or 15 years down the road, is what will happen in the US with humanoid robots. As they become commonplace in Japan, competitive pressures will force the US to react. Whatever cultural resistance the US may have to the widespread presence of robots will give way, as robots will save companies a lot of money: robots do not require salaries, vacation time, or health benefits. Will cultural discomfort or an altruistic drive to maintain human employment keep the robots out? I doubt it. Unfortunately, I think Marshall Brain’s Robotic Nation provides an accurate prediction of what will happen. I scribbled some thoughts along these lines in a post last year, More Robot Stories - continue reading there if you want my prognosis.

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Building a PVR with Mike & Chris

Topic: Technobabble

My blogging has been sparse recently because my usual blogging time has been taken over by my Personal Video Recorder (PVR) assembly project. A PVR is a do-it-yourself TiVo. The main advantage over TiVo is that you don’t have to pay anyone a monthly subscription fee. The disadvantage, especially if you want to use your PVR with a TV instead of a computer monitor, is that you’re dealing with bleeding edge technology. That means you’ll find lots of debates about the “right way” to configure the system and you’ll inevitably hit a few snags while setting things up. But if you’re a geek, that’s also what makes it fun. And besides, according to the New York Times, everybody’s doing it.

My friend and co-worker Chris wanted to build one too, so we decided to pool our expertise and save on shipping costs by buying our components together. We built our systems from scratch. Where things got tricky was deciding what to do for the TV tuner card, video card, and PVR software. We did lots of Googling and browsed through the SageTV forums to assess our options (the Build Your Own PVR site was also helpful). The only thing everyone agreed on is that you need a TV tuner card with hardware-based encoding, so that writing your favorite TV shows to files doesn’t slow your PC to a crawl.

Where folks disagreed was on how to get the best picture when decoding the files back to your screen. If you use an ordinary TV tuner card (like the Hauppauge PVR-150) with an ordinary video card, and run the output via S-video to your TV, the picture quality will, at best, be about the same as a VHS tape. I started with a configuration like that, and was disappointed with the results. Cartoons, with their limited use of color and detail, looked fine, but live action scenes, especially if they involved hard-to-digitize video elements like smoke, looked lousy.

There are two ways to a better picture. One is to go with a higher-end video card that’s designed for gaming (specifically, an ATI or NVIDIA card). Most of the folks in the forums who were watching on a TV instead of a computer monitor used the S-video out on these cards. Some of the new cards apparently have a component out as well. Some used a VGA-to-component adapter (but you have to be careful not to blow up your TV!).

The other approach is to go with the Hauppauge PVR-350, which is a tuner card that has a hardware-based decoder and S-video out built-in. This is supposed to give the best possible picture, but there’s a major drawback: it will only output data that was processed through the tuner. That is, you can’t use it as a substitute for a video card (e.g. it won’t show your Windows desktop). The big breakthrough for this card came last year when the SageTV folks figured out how to run their TV scheduling video overlays through it, so you could at least see that much through your TV.

I currently have the PVR-150, which I’m going to give to Chris (as he hasn’t bought his TV tuner card yet, and that’s the one he wants). I’m going to get the PVR-350. Since I don’t want to have a computer monitor sitting next to the TV, I’m also going to get an S-video selector box. My TV only has one S-video input, so I can use the selector box to switch between the output from the TV tuner card and the output from the video card. I’ll probably only need access to the desktop every once and a while, so it should work out fine.

My main motivation for doing all this was to provide time-shifting and commercial-removal for the shows Kai watches. SageTV is really cool: you can easily search the TV schedule for a show (say, Sesame Street) and then tell it to record every new instance (i.e. so it won’t record a re-run if you’ve already recorded it), and then you can tell it to keep, say, the 10 most recent episodes on the hard drive, and to just delete older ones. And I’ll finally be able to keep up with The Daily Show! I’m putting Kai to bed when it’s on at 7, and I’m asleep when it’s on at 11. Since The Daily Show seems to have more than your average number of commercials, I bet I can watch an entire episodes in 15 minutes after skipping them.

The other cool thing is that you can hook up your VCR to it, so you can transfer your videotapes to DVD. We have some infant videos of Kai I’d like to digitize! And I guess it’s the only way I’ll ever see the non-Special Edition of Star Wars on DVD…

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Keeping up with P2P

Topic: Technobabble

Back in the day, (all of 2 years ago), I found good stuff on Napster. The concerns over copyright weren’t significant in regard to my interests, as I was mostly looking for obscure tracks (B-sides, concert bootlegs, etc.) from obscure bands (NoMeansNo, Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, Steroid Maximus, etc.) - not the kind of stuff that’s going to hurt anybody’s record sales. (Rather than fighting new technology like most of the music industry, insound.com has embraced it, and they’re making a bundle, but that’s another topic…).

There were two reasons Napster had such a huge library: 1. it was the only significant online P2P system around at the time, and 2. it got a huge amount of free publicity from the news media. Now we have a number of different P2P networks and a variety of client software packages to choose from. Venturing into this world, I stumbled around for a while before figuring out the best approach. There are a lot of client software options: Morpheus, Limewire, BearShare, Xolox, Phex, neoNapster, Shareaza, and more. There are also different networks you can connect to: Gnutella1, Gnutella2, the eDonkey network, bitTorrent, and probably more.

I started out with Morpheus but it was a huge resource hog. It also came with spyware. I then tried LimeWire, which was much nicer to my PC and did not contain spyware. But my searches would not persist. What I mean is this: I’d enter a search, and it would chug away for 10-15 minutes, and then it would essentially forget about. My search would continue to display, but if I didn’t get any results right away, then I would never get any at all. I’d have to keep re-running the search to keep up with changes on the network. I’ve now settled on using Shareaza, which runs nicely, has no spyware, connects to all the major networks, and diligently runs my searches continuously.

The eDonkey network is better at finding what you’re looking for and has sophisticated handling for large files, which means a lot of the action, especially for movies, has moved there. The downside is that the queues on eDonkey can be mighty long (I often get a queue position over 1,000) so you have to be willing to leave your PC on continuously (and hope your network connection doesn’t go down, which will force you out of your queue position if you can’t get back online quickly). Out of curiosity I downloaded a couple of movies. I found the quality to be poor: really major compression artifacts were always a problem, and some of the movies were just recorded by someone in a theater with a camera, so you sometimes get people walking in front of the camera, ambient noise, etc. But given the ever-increasing bandwidth capacity of networks, and the ever-improving compression technologies, I imagine Hollywood is soon going to fully join up with the music industry in its war against filesharing.

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AIM Users Beware

Topic: Technobabble

If you use AOL instant messenger, it has probably installed a program called wildtangent on your system. This is an online gaming plugin. According to the company that makes it, it’s not doing anything pernicious. But spyany.com says it that will share your name, address, phone number and email address (if it can get them, presumably from your AOL profile) and track your software product usage. They also tell you how to uninstall it.

What’s interesting is that AOL didn’t modify their EULA to cover the inclusion of wildtangent until after they began distributing it with AIM. So even if you actually bothered to read the fine print, you wouldn’t have known about it.

I discovered wildtangent installing itself on my system when my spybot system monitor caught it trying to make changes to my system registry. I’ve been refusing my AIM client’s recent attempts to upgrade itself, but that apparently doesn’t stop the wildtangent installation from happening. If you’re using Windows, I highly recommend spybot - you can download it for free.

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Technorati is Broken

Topic: Technobabble

You may have noticed I added a link to Technorati in the right-hand column about six weeks ago. I have removed it. Technorati is supposed to be the Google of blogs. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. I have repeatedly tried to “claim” my blog, but it never goes through. When I try to sign in, my password never works (I end up having to reset it every time I want to sign in). I’ve attempted to change my contact email address with them 3 times, and it never sticks (it keeps reverting back to the email address I initially signed up with). At first I thought maybe they were having a bad day, but I’ve tried several times over the past month or so, and I have the same trouble every time. The idea behind their site is cool, but the implementation is a disaster.

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